As Tory poll ratings creep up from being “catastrophic” to merely “terrible”, the possibility of a hung parliament after the next election lurches into view. Although the SNP’s self-implosion may Labour’s route to a majority easier, going from their worst defeat since 1935 to 326-odd seats currently requires a 13 per cent swing.
So if the Prime Minister was able in the next eighteen months to get Keir Starmer’s lead down into single figures, it will not only be those of us who spend our free time fiddling with our swingometers that will start to wonder what the parliamentary arithmetic will look like the morning after the election night before. We can speculate that it will not be the happiest of sights for either party.
Starmer might find it easier to cobble together a majority, but he could be reliant on both the Liberal Democrats and the SNP. That hardly made life easy for Jim Callaghan in the late 70s. The Tories can’t be smug. Even if we are the largest party, we would struggle, like a feckless teenager in nightclub, to find anyone to buddy up with.
One cannot see Stephen Flynn and Rishi Sunak making cute; as in 2010, the political headwinds point towards the Liberal Democrats pushing out an unpopular and long-standing incumbent. As in 2017, that would leave the Conservatives reliant on the DUP. But as this week’s vote on the Windsor Framework showed, the distance between us and our fellow unionists is significant. An Irish Sea border, perhaps?
Prior to both the 2010 and 2015 elections, the Conservative leadership explored a potential agreement with the DUP with an eye to a possible hung parliament. After Theresa May’s election gambit failed in 2017, those games of footsie turned in short order to a genuine courtship and a shotgun wedding in the confidence and supply agreement.
A marriage made in haste proved more uncomfortable to both parties than they had assumed. The tergiversations of May’s Brexit negotiations resulted in the ‘backstop’ designed, as she saw it, to protect Northern Ireland’s place in the Union. It met with a firm no from the DUP, since they believed it would, er, weaken Northern Ireland’s place in the Union.
Unfortunately, by rejecting May’s efforts, the party was destined to join the not-insubstantial corps of folk to whom Boris Johnson has said one thing and then done another. Despite telling the DUP’s conference in 2018 that “no British government could or should” put a border in the Irish Sea, he effectively signed up for one as the price of getting Brexit done.
The Northern Ireland Protocol remains on the statute book; that promised bridge from the mainland remains stoically unbuilt. In the DUP’s mind, this grand shafting followed the Anglo-Irish Agreement and the Belfast Agreement as the last example of Westminster selling unionism down the river to get Ireland onside. One sympathisers with their frustrations: does anyone doubt that there are many this side of the Irish Sea who see Northern Ireland, à la Vietnam, as a problem, not a country?
That mentality is particularly embarrassing for the so-called Conservative and Unionist Party. Our Deputy Editor has dutifully fought against it for the last decade. Yet even when we might share a common cause, the DUP are still political rivals for as long as the Northern Ireland Conservatives run candidates. That 0.03 per cent of the vote at the last Assembly elections counts for more than one might think.
Even without that competition, one must also note that fundamental differences between the Conservatives and the DUP are only growing. The Windsor Framework shows any common ground on Brexit has long since receded; abortion and same-sex marriage will be sticking points for the growing number of Tory MPs who take their whip on social issues from the excesses of American progressivism.
The vote on Sunak’s deal this week thus confirmed a trend of increasing separation that has been apparent since the ‘backstop’ first reared its ugly head. Unless the Prime Minister makes it a policy to chuck Ulster whatever cash Jeremy Hunt can find down the back of the sofa in the next year and a half, Jeffrey Donaldson is unlikely to be sympathetic.
The return of power-sharing remains an open question. For all our differences, the Conservatives and the DUP do have an incentive to get along. Then again, one recalls that Labour did explore securing the DUP’s support in both 2010 and 2015 – and Starmer does struggle with originality. May the horse trading commence.